Linux APIs

compatibility layer for running Windows software on Unix-like systems

The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It provides a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel and other kernels for application use. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and, indirectly, other programming languages). It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU operating system.

Pygame is a cross-platform set of Python modules designed for writing video games. It includes computer graphics and sound libraries designed to be used with the Python programming language.

free software multimedia library

a standard for Linux distributions

OpenAL (Open Audio Library) is a cross-platform audio application programming interface (API). It is designed for efficient rendering of multichannel three-dimensional positional audio. Its API style and conventions deliberately resemble those of OpenGL. OpenAL is an environmental 3D audio library, which can add realism to a game by simulating attenuation (degradation of sound over distance), the Doppler effect (change in frequency as a result of motion), and material densities.

professional sound server daemon

PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.

software library for video game development

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cross-platform software development library designed to provide a simple application programming interface (API) to various multimedia components in computers

The '''Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API (LADSPA''') is an application programming interface (API) standard for handling audio filters and audio signal processing effects, licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later. Originally designed through consensus on the Linux Audio Developers mailing list, it now works on a variety of platforms. It is used in many free audio software projects, and there is a wide range of LADSPA plug-ins available.

musl is a C standard library intended for operating systems based on the Linux kernel, released under the MIT License. It was developed by Rich Felker to write a clean, efficient, and standards-conformant libc implementation.

libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.

dietlibc is a C standard library subset released under the GNU General Public License Version 2, and proprietary licenses are also available. It was developed with the help of about 100 volunteers by Felix von Leitner with the goal to compile and link programs to the smallest possible size. dietlibc was developed from scratch and thus only implements the most important and commonly used functions. It is mainly used in embedded devices.

GLFW (Graphics Library Framework) is a lightweight utility library for use with OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan. It provides programmers with the ability to create and manage windows as well as OpenGL and Vulkan contexts, as well as handle joystick, keyboard and mouse input.

DirectFB (Direct Frame Buffer), now continued as DirectFB2, is a software library with a small memory footprint that provides graphics acceleration, input device handling and abstraction layer, and integrated windowing system with support for translucent windows and multiple display layers on top of the Linux framebuffer without requiring any kernel modifications. DirectFB is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

abstraction layer for Linux kernel to show graphics on the system console

Newlib is a C standard library implementation intended for use on embedded systems. It is a conglomeration of several library parts, all under free software licenses that make them easily usable on embedded products.

Raylib (stylized as raylib) is a cross-platform open-source software development library. The library was made to create graphical applications and games.

In computing, klibc is a minimalistic subset of the standard C library developed by H. Peter Anvin. It was developed mainly to be used during the Linux startup process, and it is part of the early user space, i.e. components used during kernel startup, but which do not run in kernel mode. These components do not have access to the standard library (usually glibc or musl) used by normal userspace programs.

ClanLib is a video game SDK, supporting Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux, with partial support for mobile platforms. It has full hardware accelerated graphics support through OpenGL, and also a software renderer. ClanLib also helps in playing sound, using the Vorbis or MikMod libraries, and has classes for collision detection, GUIs, XML, networking, and other things that may be helpful to a game programmer.